The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

His eyes flared. “The child is not a symbol of anything. He was not a trendy victim of ‘child abuse.’ He was murdered, tortured and murdered. He was prey to the darkest, most complicated murdering personality type the human race has produced, and since we can’t bring a dead boy back to life, it’s not our job to imagine him playing second base. It’s our job to go get the S.O.B. who did it.”

  Stoud grinned. There was nothing quite like Richard Walter reaching for the sword.

  “AE,” the state trooper said. It was a statement, not a question. The boy had clearly been murdered by the fourth and most diabolical type of killer—the anger-excitation killer.

  “Of course,” Walter said, as he spun the triple-digit combination of his silver attaché on the coffee table in front of him. Stoud watched the thin fingers carefully lift out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper.

  “The Helix,” Walter said, holding it up. “The map to the bottom, the black hole at the end of the continuum.”

  Walter was loath to discuss the Helix, and was downright paranoid about showing it to anyone, even his protégé. When murder descended to the fourth personality subtype, AE, Walter’s schemata described a murderer who killed not for any tangible achievement—money or power or revenge—but simply for the unmatched excitement and pleasure of killing. The AE or sadistic killer murdered and tortured strangers, killed purely for secondary sexual enjoyment, and couldn’t stop. The complex pleasures of sadism drove him insatiably to kill and kill again until he was caught and incarcerated, was killed himself, or died of old age. It was the kind of killer responsible for the dark legends in all cultures of human beasts like Dracula and the werewolf—and in modern times men like Pedro Alonso Lopez, “The Monster of the Andes,” arrested in 1980 after killing more than three hundred women. Yet it was a monster rare enough in American civilization until the 1960s and ’70s, until it went by the names Bundy, Gacy, Boston Strangler, Night Stalker, Green River Killer, and dozens of others. Now the FBI said there were sadistic serial killers operating in every state.

  The Helix was a hand-drawn illustration of a swirling spiral cone, marked all along its length by tiny neat handwritten legends in black ink.

  “Richard,” Stoud teased. “Turn on that computer yet? Revolutionary papers in forensic journals are generally not handwritten.”

  Walter scoffed at the idea he would publish it. “I do not even want to expose it to a hacker, or leave its impressions on a typewriter ink ribbon.”

  Walter was right to be paranoid about the Helix and keep it locked away in the steel-ribbed attaché, Stoud thought. The thin man sounded grandiose when he described it as “the most dangerous knowledge in the world.” But he had a point. While it didn’t teach a man how to build a nuclear bomb, it showed him something more perilous—how to release the darkest evil in himself.

  “I have to be careful,” Walter said. “The sadists are the first ones to attend my lectures, to order reprints of my papers. Like everyone, the sadist is eager to find out who he really is, how to achieve his dream. In the wrong hands, the Helix is a self-help guide for a serial killer or a mass murderer.” Once, when making his speech in Marquette, Michigan, “Sadistic Acting Out: A Theoretical Model,” at a forensic convention, Walter saw a suspected rapist in the audience.

  Sadists take their work seriously, he said. Sexual sadists, like Ted Bundy, represent the class of criminals with the highest IQ, an average of 119. They are often very bright, charming, and utterly normal and trustworthy—until, being master manipulators, they get an unsuspecting victim alone, and the monster emerges. The learning curve is complicated and absorbs all the senses—touching, viewing, smelling, tasting, hearing. It’s difficult and time-consuming to figure out exactly what to do next. In Kansas, Walter spent a day consulting with the Wichita police helping them piece together a series of murders that police believed were caused by one man. That afternoon as he was about to lecture on sadism to the First World Meeting of Police Surgeons and Police Medical Officers, “a detective came up to me and said, ‘I just kicked the suspect out of your audience.’” The suspected serial killer had been prepared to take notes.

  As one of the founders of modern criminal profiling, Walter was widely known for describing the four personality subtypes of killers with Keppel. He was the first to deeply analyze the psychology of bite-mark evidence left by murderer-rapists. He pioneered a system for analyzing pre-crime, crime, and post-crime behavior of murder suspects. But the Helix, containing his theory of sadism, was his greatest contribution to criminology. When FBI agent Robert Ressler heard him lecture on it in the mid-1980s, he immediately invited Walter to Quantico to lecture to the bureau’s Behavioral Sciences Unit profilers, and the two profilers began a lifelong friendship. Walter teased Ressler that “the bureau still doesn’t understand sadism. Bob, the FBI hasn’t had a new idea since 1978.”

  Unlike the first three personality types of killers, for whom murder is the goal, murder is not the motivation for the anger-excitation killer; the process of killing itself is the pleasure and the goal—prolonged torture that sparks the killer’s fantasy life. While other murderers acted as deeply flawed or evil human beings, the sadist’s indoctrination and transformation was so thorough he or she seemed no longer human. Once a murderer reached the complex fury known as anger-excitation, it was as if a trapdoor opened beneath him, with eight steps down to the very bottom, the worst killers of humankind. Based on thousands of interviews with sadists and other murderers as well as the testimony of cops in the field, Walter’s Helix charted those eight steps with psychological and behavioral precision.

  It was a time-honored path of self-discovery pointing toward annihilation blazed by the Marquis de Sade, the seventeenth-century father of sadism, and all who follow. The journey could also be seen as the precise opposite of the hero’s journey, the timeless climb to redemption, the soul’s climb to enlightenment or God; in ages past it was known as the downward journey, to the Father of Darkness. The medieval imagery was apt. It was the wasteland of the soul. Although visually the Helix resembled Francis Crick and James Watson’s DNA double helix representing the code to life, it functioned more like Dante’s fourteenth-century map of the underworld, leading through increasing human sins, betrayals, and monstrosities to the bottom, the Ninth Circle of Hell.

  “Sadism is a crime of luxury,” Walter said. “Not everybody can afford it. It takes time, investment, it takes a covert life, it takes a whole series of learning requirements—it’s like a Ph.D. There’s a sequential learning pattern for them; you just don’t wake up one day and you’re a sexual sadist. It’s the growth curve of evil.”

  But like other arts that were once the exclusive province of the aristocracy, sadism is now within the reach of the masses. Once a man needed wealth, power, position to have the luxury of time and access to victims. Now all he needed, Walter said, was “a minimum-wage job, a studio apartment, a cheap panel truck, cable TV to instruct him, and his full suite of constitutional freedoms.” Sexual sadists are rarer in repressive societies; they are a dark fruit of democracy.

  In the Helix, Walter charts an inexorable eight-step pattern of increasing depravity that leads to the sadistic killer and beyond, to the very depths of human evil.

  “If I locate a developing sadist on the Helix, I know where he’s been, and I know where he’s going.”

  In the beginning, the developing sadist, lured by the temptation of his own obsessions, is drawn to a self-destructive fetish, such as “pornography, a lust for women’s shoes or teens’ underwear, or whatever. All sexual sadists have fetishes, usually three or four operating at one time. All fetishists don’t become sexual sadists.”

  Once snared by his fetish, however, the potential sadist has entered the Helix. And once inside, there is no way out. Walter spoke of it as if it were a “House of Sadism.” “A man enters a room,” Walter said, “and the door closes behind him. Men make choices, and there are doors that close permanently. There is no going back.” He
may never progress to step two, but that is the only direction available—downward, to the depths of the pathology.

  The pathology is insatiable. When the fetish no longer satisfies, the next step is voyeurism. The voyeur can be highly specialized. “I had a case where the voyeur was a Peeping Tom specializing in Army lieutenants’ wives,” Walter said.

  The following step, when the voyeur needs more, is frotteurism. “We’ve all been victims of frotteurs,” Richard Walter said. “These are the people who get sexual gratification from anonymously rubbing against you in a crowd.” As an adjunct professor at Michigan State University, Walter investigated two students, homosexual twins, who wore tight jeans every Saturday and waited for the 72,000 faithful to pour out of Spartan Stadium after football games, touching and feeling as they worked unseen against the crowd.

  The sadist is now on a path to achieve intimacy and sexual gratification without vulnerability, making the wrong choice endlessly depicted in the oldest stories, taking without giving his heart. Unable to form authentic relationships, he becomes a “master at manipulating others to get what he wants. Sadists even go through marriages, but by and large unless the person has something they want, they just don’t count.” Many achieve normal sexual relations with wives, husbands, or lovers, but after a time that level of emotional vulnerability becomes intolerable. It’s “far more satisfying to target potential victims and imagine or later actualize out the relationship with them in the total control position.”

  Fetishists, voyeurs, and frotteurs choose and control their victims from an emotional distance. But in subsequent steps the sadist crosses a dangerous divide. Fantasy or limited touching or striking is no longer enough; he desires the more intimate relationship, and approaches the victim with punishing control in mind: dominance, submission, bondage, and discipline.

  “He can’t bond, he can’t achieve sexual satisfaction by being honest and legitimate, can’t emotionally invest in anybody else, is totally exploiting, so he finds secondary sexual gratification by dominating a victim utterly. It’s a systematic way to feed and empower himself through fantasies by creating a sense of dread and dependency in the victim. Their thrill comes from the feeling ‘I own you. You don’t eat unless I say so. You live and breathe at my request. Your life is not your own.’ It gives them a messianic sense of importance.”

  When bondage no longer satisfies, the developing sadist inevitably becomes a devotee of picquerism. A picquer derives from the French, meaning to penetrate, cut. “Picquers derive sexual satisfaction from stabbing, cutting, slicing, rendering human flesh. It’s the people who cut leather coats in stores as a second skin, a practice skin. They’re freeway snipers firing rifle shots into the victim, like the Tower Killer, or lovers’-lane killers like the Son of Sam.”

  The final descent is to full-blown sadism. One becomes a sadistic killer, deriving sexual satisfaction from a complex ritual of torturing and murdering a victim. Bundy, who said pornography started him onto the path of the Helix, ended here.

  The Bundy-type killer has prepared extensively for this moment. He has taken health classes so he will not contract AIDS or another illness. He becomes expert on the universal methods of saving his victim’s life—again and again—to prolong the pleasure of torture. He strangles her to within an inch of death, stops to apply Red Cross–approved mouth-to-mouth. He strangles her again, this time with ligature, a pleasure of a different shade, and moments before death revives her again with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  Then it’s on to the bathroom, where he holds her head under a full tub of cool water and drowns her to within an inch of her life yet again. This is a subtly different pleasure entirely; while instructing police worldwide on the varieties of sadistic experience, Walter tells them to fill a bucket with cool water and hold a large sponge underwater with both hands, allowing themselves to feel the tingles on the small hairs along the arm, the awakening of an erogenous zone. Then they realize why so many female strangling victims are found near or in water or bathtubs—it’s not, as police commonly assume, to destroy the evidence. The water heightens the killer’s sensitivity and pleasure.

  The horrors are limited only by the sadist’s imagination. The endgame, always, is sexual gratification produced by constantly exposing the victim to dominance, degradation, and dread. Walter has interviewed a few extremely lucky and rare women who survived twelve hours at the hands of a sexual sadist and somehow escaped. “They were begging to die,” he said.

  Even during the torture and murder, the killer cannot expose himself emotionally to the victim. Only after he takes body parts back to his lair can he feel enough in control to open up sexually. Through more than forty victims, this was Ted Bundy’s raison d’être. His souvenir was the head. In the privacy of his home, he masturbated on the young woman’s head, then burned it in a fireplace.

  When taking souvenirs doesn’t gratify anymore, the sadistic killer knows three final, descending options: necrophilia, or sex with the dead, historic vampirism—the ancient practice of blood draining, driven by sexual sadism—and finally cannibalism. Eating human flesh is the sadist’s ultimate sexual union, the ultimate intimacy without vulnerability: “I own you entirely.”

  This was Jeffrey Dahmer’s final stop, the subfloor of the house of sadism. The centuries of fables about an angry man who must open his heart to love, to the vulnerability of life, or face psychological death—the tale of beauty and the beast—are not without meaning. Dahmer was simultaneously gratified and mocked by the insatiable hollowness and evil of his choice—a literal feast of death. For him, cannibalism was only the beginning. He literally could eat all he wanted, but he’d never be satisfied. “The desire is insatiable.”

  The eight steps led to the abyss, the root of the myth of Dracula and the reality of Hitler, the grotesque killing forms Walter called the “ultimate nightmare.” Walter was an atheist, but despite his Christian metaphors Dante had done a fine job of portraying evil, Walter said.

  The thin man went to the shelf and pulled down a beaten old copy of The Inferno, which he hadn’t read since college. He was intrigued to see the fourteenth-century poet had done similar work, apportioning hell into nine concentric circles, the last of which had four zones.

  “The Ninth Circle of Hell is impressive,” he said. It was the lake of ice known as Cocytus, where betrayers of humanity were frozen for eternity, each encased to a different depth, from the waist down to total immersion. Walter admired the many excellent forms of vengeance portrayed, such as Count Ugolino beating the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, who had imprisoned and starved him and his children. At the center of the lake is Satan, waist-deep in ice, a huge, terrifying, winged beast with three heads. The three mouths each chew on traitors such as Brutus and Judas Iscariot. The six eyes weep tears that mix with the traitors’ blood. The six wings beat to escape but send an icy wind that further imprisons all. Judas suffers the most, his head in the mouth of Lucifer, his back forever skinned by Lucifer’s claws.

  “I quite like it,” Walter said. “A little overdramatic, perhaps. But perps haven’t changed much, nor their just deserts.”

  Stoud saw the photographs of the boy covering the trestle table. His studied the old police photos from 1957. Walter pointed to the cuts and bruises all over the body. He saw evidence of burning, cutting, spanking, and ligature marks. There were signs of starvation and dehydration. The anus had been sodomized, evidently with all manner of instruments. One hand and one foot were severely withered, a process caused by overexposure to water.

  The burn scars on the torso showed perhaps where cigarettes had been put out. There was evidence needles had been inserted here and there. The narrow head squeezed in on the sides by some terrible pressure, probably a vise.

  As soon as he saw the photographs, Walter realized that the police, led by the late Remington Bristow, had built much of four decades of investigation on the wrong premise. Bristow’s sentimental attachment to the idea the boy had been accidental
ly killed by loving parents was absurd.

  “It’s sadism,” Walter said. “Now we see that what Mary told Kelly and McGillen in Cincinnati makes perfect sense.” Mary’s mother had an ideal setup to enjoy her exploitation of the boy, he said. The irony of being a respected librarian, working with schoolchildren on the prestigious Main Line of Philadelphia, would have excited her. It was the 1950s, when the world of suburban mothers and children was portrayed by June Cleaver standing in the kitchen in her apron saying with a frown, “I’m worried about the Beave.” And the Beaver saying, “Gee, Wally, that’s swell!”

  The boy’s secluded basement prison was a perfect cover for her. Emotionally drained after her attacks, she could clean herself of blood or hair, lock the boy back down in his box, and reassume her roles in society. Neighbor. Friend. Librarian. Wife. Mother. She’d become more rigid, sadism would change her personality, but she’d handle it far below the radar, a few more Bloody Marys with her husband, a few more appearances at church.

  She would have thrilled with the sense of power of dominating her secret, far different world.

  “She didn’t need to cover up in front of her husband or daughter; they were thoroughly terrified of her, totally submissive,” Walter said. “Guilt was nonexistent. She was comfortable with the facts—this is who I am. While everyone else is searching for who they are, she knows the truth.”

  The torture would have proceeded slowly and escalated over the months and years. “The fancy term for the cuts and bruises we see is polymorphic perverse—all over the body, equidistant, no one particular preference. Keep in mind this boy’s penis is not going to give this woman any satisfaction, what’s going to give her satisfaction, in this heaviest and most complicated of subtypes, is in the process of killing. So therefore one administers torture in a systematic way that then gets them off. Each time she’s injuring him she’s fantasizing the ultimate death, but she’s trying to maximize the experience of emasculation over time.”